


An Unimpressive Story

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Caves, Gen, Jellyfish, POV First Person, Scuba Diving, Trick or Treat: Trick, Unexplained happenings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-31 18:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21150314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Everyone has crazy stories about the unbelievable things they've seen. Mine isn't that impressive, but I swear it's true.





	An Unimpressive Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [labocat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/labocat/gifts).

Lots of people have ghost stories or similarly inexplicable things that they’ve seen. I’ve got one, though I wish it was better.

A girl I knew growing up saw a guy she swears was a murderer while she was out horseback riding in the woods. She claims that he was walking along with a shovel and when he stared straight at her the look in his eyes just wasn’t right. Even the horse got spooked by him, not that horses don’t get spooked by most unexpected things.

A friend I sometimes go diving with has seen plenty of strange things while out in the water or when he’s hunting. He even has pictures of enormous paw prints, unmistakable as belonging to anything other than a mountain lion, from a hunting trip in upstate New York.

I go cave diving enough and half the people I’ve dived with had stories of seeing strange, impossible things. I’ve heard about people seeing red light illuminating the water when they were more than twenty meters down. There are people I’ve personally met who’ve found bones in caves, usually dolphin, but some that they couldn’t explain. People get followed by sharks, large fish, things they couldn’t make out. Mysterious lights and sounds are abundant, random encounters with people where they didn’t expect to see other divers, or divers that appeared out of nowhere and vanished just as suddenly without a trace, and all sorts of crazy things like that.

What I saw though, it’s nowhere near as impressive as any of that. Crazy sure, but not amazing.

I was at Peacock Springs park, down in Florida, not a particularly challenging or impressive dive given how thoroughly mapped the place is, about as ordinary as any of the other tourist attractions down there. The thing is, the place is pretty and you know what you’re going to see, which makes for a nice, relaxing day. There are times when being able to plan things and just hang out with friends is nice, not that I was with friends that time so there’s no one to back up my story.

I was swimming along, not really sticking to any of the main routes or guidelines, but not deliberately avoiding them. Because it was kind of the off season, or maybe just a weird time of day I was pretty much alone until I got to Olsen Sink. There was another diver there and they seemed in distress.

I surfaced to find out what was wrong, like maybe they’d run out of air or something, because there was no way that they’d gotten lost.

Before I could say anything the guy looked at me, eyes bugging out.

“Did you see the jellyfish?”

“The what?” I asked, because the springs are freshwater and nowhere near the ocean. No jellyfish, no matter how lost they could have been would be in there.

“The jellyfish,” he repeated, “Didn’t you see them?”

The guy was really shaken, like teeth chattering despite how warm the water was.

I’ll admit that I backed up a little, not that there was much space to back up. You don’t expect to meet actually crazy people in the water, but you never know. I mean jellyfish in a freshwater spring?

I asked him where, half playing along, half morbidly curious and he gave me sort of vague directions, a little side area off of the main route.

Because I’m not an asshole I asked him if he needed help and he shook his head. I could tell, by the look of him that he was probably going to climb out of the water despite the sink being closed as soon as I was gone, because there was no way he was diving back down.

That was fine by me because of course I followed his directions, needing to backtrack a few times when I overshot it. It wasn’t that his directions were bad, freaked out or not he had a good sense of distance and direction, he just noticed the most random things to use as landmarks.

I figured that I’d find a bunch of plastic bags or something that got blown in somehow and that grabbing them and getting them out of the water would be my good deed for the day.

I did manage to find the place though, a little side area that went on for way further than I’d expected, or maybe it just felt that way. It wasn’t uncomfortably narrow, though there were a few places where the slope of the top and bottom were weird, not unnerving, just weird like happens in caves sometimes. The normal rules of how things are supposed to be don’t always seem to apply to caves.

It opened up a little, enough to feel like I was in a room rather than a tunnel, when it happened.

Jellyfish, hundreds of them, were bobbing all over the place. Big, open water jellyfish with clusters of serious looking tentacles and spotted bells the size of dinner plates.

They were bouncing off of me, enough that I could feel them, but I was lucky enough not to get stung. I looked up, expecting to them all bounding off the roof of the cave, but they just kept going. Not disappearing into the dark because it was close enough that I could see the top of the cave, they just kept going straight up through it.

The thing was, I could feel them. They were real, solid things, to the extent that jellyfish are solid, but they were vanishing.

There were enough of them that it was hard for me to see where I was going to turn around and get out of there.

I actually started going in the wrong direction, only to catch my mistake and need to swim back though the swarm. They were only in the one area so getting past them wasn’t a big deal, or at least not too big a deal.

I did go back to Olsen Sink, to let the guy know that I’d seen them to, but he was gone.

After that I decided I was done diving for the day because there’s only so much weirdness you can take at a time and I’d reached my limit.

Of course I looked into it to see if there were freshwater jellyfish in the area. There weren’t, not that I expected there to be.

A few years later I was diving down in the Keys and saw a jellyfish that looked identical to the ones from the cave. One of the people I was diving with looked at the thing like it had offended her personally and I asked her about it afterwards.

Turned out the thing was a spotted jelly and they were invasive as hell. I never did get an explanation of what a swarm of them would be doing in a cave and everyone agreed that the idea was nonsense and I had to be mistaken.

I know I wasn’t though, I know what I saw, silly as it sounds.

Mysterious, impossible jellyfish in a place they had no business being might not make for the best story, but that’s my crazy diving story.

**Author's Note:**

> You asked for jellyfish and I'm fascinated by most things aquatic so it was pretty much a given that you'd get them.


End file.
